While working on my Scyldings speech, I’ve only been doing light reading for the blog, but since I owe you all some blog posts, I started taking notes on this one. Fear, by Bob Woodward, was recommended offhandedly by Thomas777 a while ago. I’ve never actually read a Woodward book before. Woodward is certainly a shitlib, but his journalistic rigor mostly allows the subjects of his book to speak for themselves. And speak they do. Fear is about the first half of the Trump presidency, and although it is designed to show how Trump is a liar, what it actually shows is how his administration often and sometimes illegally undermined his agenda.
One of the many complaints right-wingers had about the Trump administration was the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and their outsize influence on the President. Trump’s Chief of Staff Reince Priebus complained frequently about them (p. 190):
“Ivanka strongly wanted her father to stick with the pro-environmental agreement. Priebus would be meeting in his office with a handful of aides from the economic team and the National Economic Council for 15 minutes and in would walk Ivanka. She would sit down and often say nothing.
Who is this person? Priebus marveled. What is she doing?
It was becoming impossible to manage the West Wing. At times it seemed Ivanka’s presence—hours a day, days in a row—was nonstop. Jared had the same squatter’s rights in the West Wing. They were like a posse of second-guessers, hovering, watching, interacting as family and senior advisers with the president. Ivanka planted seeds of doubt about policy and passed her father articles.”